Tag Archives: AT&T

It’s hard to believe, but I remember when vacuum tubes were viable circuit elements. Yes, I’m that old. At about age 13, I began repairing and constructing vacuum tube circuits in 1959. Transistor prices fell rapidly and quickly replaced vacuum tubes in low power, low speed applications. Tubes remained viable in high frequency applications above 100 Watts through the 1970s. Transistors and integrated circuits pushed out vacuum tubes everywhere else.

High power transmitting tubes glowed magically. 250TH and 304TH plates lit up with dull orange to bright yellow colors as a function of plate current. 4-1000 plates glowed cherry red to pumpkin orange. Mercury vapor rectifier tubes such as 866s and 872s lit up their trapped vapors with a beautiful blue glow.

This Western Electric film from 1940 takes us through their vacuum tube manufacturing processes. They include a surprising number of skilled hand labor operations. Note how many women performed these delicate tasks.

Seven years after this film’s release, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley co-invented the transistor. Today even 50 kilowatt transmitters are entirely solid-state.

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Colin Berkshire just published an excellent article about the fat profits that are enjoyed by U.S. cellular phone service providers. His cost estimates seem reasonable, yet they amount to only two percent of revenue. He asks,

So where does all of the money go?

He replies,

The only answer I can come up with as I pour through their financials is that the cell phone business is so poorly managed that there may as well not be any management. Large bureaucracy, corporate palace headquarters buildings, lots and lots and lots of executives, and a broken business model are what you are really paying for.

Colin’s summary:

Because Verizon and AT&T are essentially an oligopoly (often matching each others’ prices and structures nearly perfectly) there is little competition, no need for efficiency, and no need to build lots of pesky towers.

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Today is the 100th anniversary of the Bell telephone system’s regulated monopoly.

Bell System logo in 1900

Until December 1913, the Bell system, under the leadership of Theodore Vail, had aggressively absorbed smaller independent telephone companies. It refused to grant competing phone companies access to its growing network, which crushed small would-be competitors. It had also acquired Western Union, which controlled the telegraph industry. Bell dominated both the domestic telegraph and the domestic telephone markets.

In 1913, the U.S. federal government was considering nationalizing the growing Bell phone system (Britain had nationalized its phone system in 1912) or breaking up Bell’s monopoly. Clearly, the government would take antitrust action of some sort, so AT&T negotiated with the Justice Department. On December 19, 1913, AT&T Vice President Nathan Kingsbury sent a letter to the Attorney General in which AT&T agreed “to divest itself of Western Union, to provide long distance services to independent exchanges under certain conditions, and to refrain from acquisitions if the Interstate Commerce Commission objected.” (Wikipedia)

Fun

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of “cuts” that were available on each operator’s computer.

“Hey, check this out,” Faulk says he would be told, “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’,” Faulk told ABC News.

Profit

AT&T charges the federal government a $325 “activation fee” for each wiretap followed by a daily maintenance fee of $10.00. Verizon charges $775 for the first month of monitoring, followed by $500 for each additional month.

Parody: GizmodoOriginal “Hope” Artist: Shepard Fairey

These companies, rather than refusing to comply with unconstitutional orders, turn a profit on compliance.

Your tax dollars at work, violating your fourth amendment right to freedom from unreasonable search, while feeding the corporatocracy.

What’s taking so long to fire and indict intelligence chief James Clapper for lying to Congress about this during sworn testimony?

The reason that AT&T service sucks is the same reason that Microsoft missed being the next Google, and why they missed the smartphone market and the tablet market and every other market this decade. It’s the same reason that HP has failed. It is the “MBA Manager Syndrome” of managers that don’t know their business and whose main skill is finance and politics.

Seeming vs Being

To begin with, the entity that calls itself AT&T is not your father’s American Telephone and Telegraph. It’s Southwestern Bell, renamed SBC for a while and merged with BellSouth, which in 2005 decided that the “AT&T” moniker had more je ne sais quoi than “SBC”. It’s headquartered in Dallas and is populated with corporate parasites: public relations people, lawyers, MBAs, and union workers. It is not a technical leader.

Lose $6B for your employer.
Take home $21 million.

Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, at the 2008 World Economic Forum. photo: Robert ScobleAll of their lawyers and all of their MBAs goofed in 2011 when AT&T’s attempt to buy T-Mobile was blocked by the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. As a result, AT&T had to pay $4 billion in compensatory fees to T-Mobile and lost another $2 billion in associated costs. In most corporations such losses would result in an overhaul of management, if not its board of directors. Not at AT&T (né Southwestern Bell). Its CEO not only kept his job, he took home $21 million last year. Nice work if you can get it.

I enjoy reading Mr. Berkshire’s articles. They reveal the inner workings and hidden mechanisms that only someone who’s worked within the Bell System would know.

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I’ve learned that in 2011’s AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion decision, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed AT&T Mobility to place clauses in their contracts which force customers to settle disputes in private arbitration AND prevent customers from bringing class action lawsuits or even class arbitration against them. It sounds like the Supreme Court has joined forces with large corporations in their war on consumers.

CNET documented this in 2012: Why you can’t sue your wireless carrier in a class action. According to its author, Marguerite Reardon, “all four major wireless carriers in the U.S. include such arbitration-only clauses in their contracts”. How did we allow this to happen? Do you suppose that the carriers’ lobbyists (spending customers’ money) had something to do with it?

By inserting “mandatory arbitration clauses” into their contracts, companies ranging from auto dealers to cell phone companies to health care providers have cut off their customers’ access to the courts, forcing them instead to settle disputes in private arbitration.

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Electronic Arts (EA, a computer game publisher) has, two years in a row, been voted the worst company in America. I missed this contest a few months ago, but will place the 2014 edition voting on my calendar.

Here Are Your Contestants For The 2013 Worst Company In America. AT&T got knocked off by EA in the semifinals. How did EA do it? Did it win on arrogance, or out-point AT&T on poor service, declining product value, and rising prices? Is their management really worse than AT&T’s? Do their MBAs, lawyers, public relations, and sales people also outnumber their product people? Did their CEO’s misguided attempt to purchase a competitor result in a payout of $6 billion, yet he still kept his job and was even paid millions that year?

Better luck next year, ISPs

I see that Comcast made it to the finals. Let’s hope that more ISPs such as Comcast and AT&T make it to the final round in 2014. They certainly deserve it.

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Today, it’s hard to find any information on AT&T’s failed packet-switched network of the late 1970s and early 1980s. AT&T’s History of Network Switching page doesn’t mention it. It’s one of the most costly engineering failures of all time, so it’s understandable that today’s AT&T (which is really a renamed Southwestern Bell) wants to forget about it. It was a project that was always just 90 days away from going on-line. In 1979, hopes were high:

The Advanced Communications System (ACS) is AT&T’s new, all-encompassing data service which will compete directly with SBS and XTEN. . . AT&T expects to have 137,000 ACS business customers by 1983.1

Sometime thereafter, AT&T’s Advanced Communications System, brainchild of its vaunted Bell Labs, with over a thousand engineers aboard, sank beneath the surface, never to be mentioned again, like a malformed stepchild. They seem to have destroyed virtually all documentation of this disaster: no schematics, no mockups, no prototypes, no photos, no nothing. Apparently when you’re a monopoly, you can waste billions of dollars, and remain in business.

What happened?

I remember reading about this great new network in the late 1970s, and since its failure to appear, wondered what happened. Recently I found a description of this catastrophe. Colin Berkshire’s post-mortem report emphasizes the importance of good system architecture; patching of subsystems will never overcome poor system design. I’m surprised that design reviews at Bell Labs didn’t nip this dud in the bud.

He tells the story from the perspective of an insider, and adds insights that I’ve not found elsewhere. For example, did you know that AT&T’s Western Electric Company was lead contractor on NORAD, SAGE, Nike-Hercules, and Nike-Ajax command guidance systems, or that the world’s largest stockpile of binary biotoxins was kept just outside Boulder Colorado by the Western Electric Company?

Western Electric’s profits

Mr. Berkshire points out that the U.S. Department of Justice wanted to end the incestuous relationship between AT&T’s Western Electric subsidiary (manufacturer of telephone equipment) and its captive customers, the Bell operating companies. Why? AT&T kept its operating companies’ profits low to please the state public service commissions (which allowed them to maintain monopolies in exchange for low profits), while keeping its unregulated Western Electric profits high.

Teletype Model 43

I remember seeing a system invoice from Western Electric to Southern Bell c 1979. One item was a Teletype Model 43 terminal, priced at 1400 dollars. (Western Electric owned Teletype.) I had recently purchased a new one for 800 dollars, so it was obvious that AT&T was moving profits from its regulated operating companies (e.g., Southern Bell) to its unregulated manufacturing subsidiary, Western Electric.

Mr. Berkshire tells a hilarious tale about AT&T’s defense against the DOJ’s prosecution. AT&T spent about 10 million dollars tying up 50,000 college economics professors with small grants to produce meaningless studies and reports, which prevented all of them from testifying against AT&T. You can’t fault AT&T for not thinking big.

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The national press this week has been vocal about PRISM, the federal program that collects user data from nine major Internet companies: Apple, AOL, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, YouTube and PalTalk. To quote Casablanca’s Captain Renault, I’m shocked — shocked — to find that snooping is going on in here!

My guess is that all major American ISPs have a room 641A, where all traffic is inhaled by NSA analyzers. You may safely assume that NSA, despite law that restricts them to foreign surveillance only, is monitoring all of your Internet actvity.

I’m not so concerned about Facebook et al. It’s the sniffing of ISP (Internet Service Provider) traffic that concerns me. We should remember Ben Franklin’s admonition:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

One message is that information markets — movies, telephone, radio, data — seem to devolve from open to closed. This leads to

lack of innovation

inflated prices

He points out that Bell Labs invented a (steel) tape recorder – based telephone answering machine in 1931 but didn’t develop it because they feared that it would reduce revenue from Bell’s operating companies. (Sounds like Kodak: they hid their invention of the digital camera because they feared that it would kill their photographic film business.)

According to Mr. Wu, “People are all the same: when they’re not in charge, they favor competition. When they’re in charge, they hate competition.”

Another message is that ownership of content and transport medium (“the pipes” that deliver content) should be kept separated.

If you’re interested in the history of American radio broadcasting, there’s no finer book than Tom Lewis’ Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio. I loved learning about the giants: David Sarnoff, Lee De Forest, and Edwin Armstrong.

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I’m convinced that every tech company contains a handful of engineers and technicians who know their product; every other employee helps create layers that prevent customers from speaking with them. AT&T is no different. I have a couple Miami-based clients who were unable to see their own websites (hosted in Orlando) when using their AT&T DSL Internet connections. Their traceroute results revealed that their packets were being dropped by AT&T, rather than being routed to Level3. Their packets never left AT&T’s network.

Twice I contacted AT&T’s DSL support department without success. One support person suggested that AT&T’s DNS servers may not have received the update for the clients’ domains. I was certain that this wasn’t the case, but obediently followed her instructions on how to request a DNS update via email, with no result. The other support person suggested that the problem wasn’t AT&T’s. On a theory that maybe Level3 was rejecting the packets, I posted a request for help on a Level3 tech support page and received no reply.

I called again. John Ledyard, another AT&T DSL support person, listened, agreed that the problem could be in AT&T’s routing tables, and asked me to email him the source and destination IP addresses together with a broken traceroute result. Mr. Ledyard told me that although he couldn’t personally fix the problem, he would forward my email to someone who could fix it. Voilà! Within a week, the packets were reaching the destination host.

I don’t know exactly what was broken or why the problem occurred, but now it’s repaired. All’s well that ends well.

I’ve known about 1968’s Carterfone decision for decades, but just recently learned of the 1956 Hush-A-Phone decision. The Hush-A-Phone was a simple cup-like acoustic gadget that fit over a telephone mouthpiece. It had been manufactured since 1920. In the late 1940s, AT&T complained about the Hush-A-Phone to the FCC, who ruled against Hush-A-Phone. Hush-A-Phone appealed to the DC District Court, which overturned the FCC decision in 1956. Thus, the door to today’s open Internet was nudged open by a simple 1920-era gadget. In 1968, the FCC’s Caterphone decision opened that door a bit wider.

The Carterfone was an electrical device that acoustically coupled a telephone handset to a radio transceiver. I’d call it an acoustic phone patch. A radio operator uses a phone patch to establish communication between someone in radio communication and someone with a telephone but no radio transceiver. Phone patches are valuable during emergencies. Most of the phone patches that I’ve used connect electrically via an audio transformer and coupling capacitor to the phone company’s copper loop. The Carterfone instead used rubber acoustic cups with microphone and speaker to couple the voices. Incredibly, AT&T objected to the Carterfone.

In 1968, the Federal Communications Commission ruled against AT&T and allowed the Carterfone and other devices to be connected directly to the AT&T network.

AT&T’s objections were nonsense.

Both the Carterfone and the Hush-A-Phone were mere acoustic devices; they had no electrical connection to AT&T’s desksets or its network. Despite this, and despite logic, AT&T argued that both devices would harm its network.

For the first half of the twentieth century, AT&T enjoyed a regulated monopoly in telecommunications. Democratic administrations helped protect their monopoly and profits in return for juicy union jobs. Union workers vote for Democrat candidates. The Hush-A-Phone decision in 1956 was the beginning of the end of the monopoly . . . and it laid the foundation for today’s open Internet.

Coincidence?

I notice a pattern. Under Democrat administrations, the FCC ruled in favor of AT&T’s monopoly. The milestone rulings that dismantled the monopoly were under Republican administrations, including Judge Harold Greene’s landmark 1984 decision that divided the AT&T operating company into seven “baby Bells”. Do you think that this is a coincidence?

My only regret was how we introduced pricing in the beginning, because how did we introduce pricing? Thirty dollars and you get all you can eat. And it’s a variable cost model. Every additional megabyte you use in this network, I have to invest capital.

Nobody foresaw the voracious data appetite of the iPhone.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski stated that a smart phone uses 24 times more spectrum than the predecessor feature phones, and a tablet uses 120 times more spectrum. Without taking action to find more spectrum for these devices, “we risk losing out on extraordinary commercial and social opportunities,” he said.

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C-Span recorded a fascinating 30-minute discussion about the breakup of AT&T thirty years ago and its impact on today’s telecommunications industry. The gist is that on the whole, the breakup was beneficial. They do express misgivings about the lack of technical leadership within the entity that now calls itself AT&T. I share their concern; when AT&T lost Bell Labs and Western Electric, they lost their technical chops. What was left was a bunch of sales people, union workers, MBAs, and lawyers. The Bell operating companies were appliance operators with little in-house technical expertise.

Whence technical leadership?

One participant points out that two key breakthroughs were invented at AT&T’s Bell Labs:

Today’s AT&T (which is a holding company created when Southwestern Bell renamed itself “AT&T”) does nothing like that sort of fundamental research.

They also correctly point out that the migration from wired to wireless telecommunications puts pressure on a limited resource — radio frequency spectrum. They seem to think that if the FCC opens more spectrum for telecom use, everything will be fine. I’m less sanguine. (See Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, published in 1948.) It’s hard to bend the laws of physics, despite sales hyperbole and cheering MBAs.

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Gordon Welchman was an Englishman who, while working on decoding German messages at Bletchley Park during World War II, invented traffic analysis. His idea was that even if one couldn’t decipher message contents, just tabulating who messaged whom, when, and how frequently, lent knowledge about the enemy.

After the war, he emigrated to America, where he became an American citizen and taught the first computer course at M.I.T. He worked for Remington Rand and eventually for the MITRE Corporation, where he enhanced traffic analysis technology and helped develop C3 (Command, Control, and Communication) systems.

Following the publication of his book The Hut Six Story in 1982, which detailed the work of his Hut Six group at Bletchley Park, his security clearance was revoked. This killed his career in intelligence.

Well, both snowboarding and skiing. Reminds me of water skiing. The middle east coast states received buckets of snow this weekend and these New Yorkers made the best of it. Yes, that looks like Broadway in Times Square.

“It re-writes the history of technology.”

I love this parody. It’s a humorous advertisement for your own mail server:

Do you run a government agency but hate complying with the law? Then you need DC Matic, the Hillary Clinton-approved email server!

credit: Written and performed by Remy. Video directed and edited by Meredith Bragg

What’s Hillary hiding? Classified emails? Sure. Evidence of her negligence in Benghazi that led to the murders of US citizens? Of course. Security breaches via assistant Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood connections? Probably. No, the ticking time bomb in this server is bribery. Maybe treason as well. She’s hiding written evidence of her deals that traded State Department help in exchange for large donations to the Clinton Foundation and large fees for speaking engagements by Bill Clinton.

Both Swope and Obama were elected to office by fools who suffer from chronic white guilt.

In 1969, Putney Swope announced:

The changes I’m gonna make will be minimal. I’m not gonna rock the boat. Rockin’ the boat’s a drag. What you do is sink the boat.

In 2008, Barack Obama bragged:

. . . we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

Mr. Obama is trying to transform America, alright. Transform it from a prosperous capitalist economy governed by a constitutional republic to a bankrupt socialist economy governed by a corrupt tyrannical dictatorship. Barack is following Putney’s credo, “What you do is sink the boat.”

The tune, “Slow Down”, is performed on piano and sung by its composer, Larry Williams. He was from New Orleans (of course). The tune, ringing with ninth chords, was released on disc in 1958. I think that the dancers are from a 1950s Hollywood rock & roll movie. Larry also composed Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Bad Boy, and Bony Moronie — classic rock tunes, all. He was born in 1935 and died on this date, January 7, in 1980.

In the mid-1950s, Williams inherited star billing from Little Richard (who’d forsaken rock and roll for religion) at New Orleans’ record label Specialty Records.

While Williams was alive, the Beatles paid their respects by admirably covering Larry’s Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Slow Down, and Bad Boy. I’m amazed that Larry Williams isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Extra credit assignment: Compare and contrast the Beatles’ cover of Slow Down with Larry Williams’ original. This clip includes the fab four wailing in Liverpool’s Cavern Club: (If YouTube has taken down this video clip, you can hear the same recording with groovy rock and roll clips (sorry — requires Flash) from 1950s America and early Beatles. Sorry for the Flash format.)

I’m delighted to discover that the video of Joni Mitchell’s classic Shadows and Light concert (1980) can be viewed in full (1h 13m) on YouTube. Supporting players are Jaco Pastorius on bass, Pat Metheny on guitar, Michael Brecker on sax, Don Alias on drums, Lyle Mays on keyboards, and The Persuasions. It’s among my favorite videos of a concert performance.

Jaco Pastorius

Jaco was a Fort Lauderdale kid who began playing in rock bands around town in a variety of clubs: She, The 4 O’Clock CLub, The Village Zoo, The Flying Machine, The Button, Bachelors III, Ocean Mist . . . When I first heard Jaco in the early 1970s, he was playing bass for straight-ahead local rock bands. He graduated to more jazz- and fusion- related music and put his unique fretless Fender bass stamp on Weather Report. I’ve heard bass players tell me that they tried to imitate Jaco’s technique, but gave up trying; they claim that Jaco changed what it meant to play electric bass guitar. Jaco’s friend Pat Metheny, who plays a beautiful lead guitar in this concert, is a University of Miami music school graduate.

Jaco seemed to still have his act together when he played this concert. Wikipedia has a good Jaco biography. He had a rapid rise to the top followed by a quick ride back down again. I had musician friends c 1984-87 who were torn up watching their friend Jaco dismantle his life. This Warner Brothers recording artist and Down Beat Hall of Fame member was sleeping on park benches and shooting baskets in a local public park.

Michael Brecker and Don Alias died a few years ago.

This is a classic performance by master musicians who were at the top of their games. Too bad it couldn’t last forever.

According to Rolling Stone magazine, the FCC is considering disciplining NBC for airing an indecent performance on July 6, Miley Cyrus’ “Bangerz Tour”. I watched it. It was provocative, but artful. Bertolt Brecht would have loved the production: live dancers against rear-projection oversized animation with creative costumes and lighting. I loved it. Some of the images, such as Miley riding a giant “Mr. Wiener”, were sexually suggestive.

Click to stream or download full 862 Megabyte video performance

The concert (recorded in Barcelona) reminded me of Madonna’s shows twenty-five years ago. Both performers have acceptable contralto voices, energetic dance skills, and assemble exciting Brechtian spectacles. I love the costuming and choreopgraphy. Shocking? “Bangerz” pushed the limits on prime-time American TV, I suppose. But that week on television, the atrocious performance by the Brazilian football team was truly shocking.

I’d prefer that the FCC take no action on this. They have enough serious issues on their plate already. Censoring art is, in my opinion, a slippery slope for any government agency . . . and I think that this production can be labeled “art”. Here’s the full show (862MB H264 1h 25m mp4 video file, 720 x 404 pixel) for download or streaming:

Click to stream or download full 862 Megabyte video performance

You’ll need a fast Internet connection to smoothly stream this. You might be better to download the file and then play it locally with a good video player such as VLC.

Is it Miley’s performance or just modern low distortion recording technique that for the first time makes John Lennon’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” lyrics (at 44m 35s) sound so . . . so . . . clear, logical, and complete?

I’ve worked with integrated circuits (I.C.s) since the 1960s, but haven’t been involved in their manufacture — only their application.

Intel Haswell wafer with a pin for scalephoto: Intel Free PressToday’s integrated circuit manufacture is a high stakes capital intensive business whose players use trade secrets to maintain their market advantage. I’ve never been inside an I.C. “fab” (factory), so it was a treat to find an hour-long presentation by an industry manufacturing engineer on YouTube. The technologies used at nano dimensions are mind-boggling.

Here’s the excellent presentation, in full:

The speaker mentions that lithographic imaging of the mask is now being done at 193 nanometer (nm). As you can see, we’re well above visible light and on our way to x-rays(!). Here’s the electromagnetic spectrum in that region:

Click for full-sizegraphic by: Shigeru23
The presentation is aimed at the layperson and is filled with surprises. For instance, one gigabyte of semiconductor memory can be produced on a flat substrate within the diameter of a human hair. I give it two (gloved) thumbs up.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. — Steve Jobs

I’m the one that’s gonna have to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to. — Jimi Hendrix

I just listened to an excellent interview with Walt Mossberg, who since 1991 wrote a weekly computer industry column for the Wall Street Journal. Walt’s now retired. Leo Laporte, an industry podcaster, coaxes some great stories from Mr. Mossberg.

Walt’s perspective was always that of a user — not a tech freak. Most industry reporters are techies who don’t appreciate that most of us don’t care about the inner workings and secret mechanisms of computers.

Walt speaks a bit about his long relationships with both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. (Walt sat in the passenger seat as Gates, frustrated by traffic, drove his Lexus for miles on the road’s shoulder.)

In the 1970s and early 1980s, I loved ABBA’s music. I was pleased to discover this recent critique, in both spoken and written form. I didn’t realize that ABBA were considered politically incorrect in their home country.

Intelligent Life magazine‘s Matthew Sweet observes that ABBA’s songs progressed from naiveté through sophistication to melancholy. As Matthew says, “Many of their songs are about accepting the failure of relationships”.

Here’s the companion article, Thank You for the Music, by Matthew Sweet, from a recent issue of Intelligent Life. Both the article and the audio clip stem from his visit to Stockholm’s ABBA Museum.

These observations will help you get the most from your swimming. (They’re from Australian podcast Effortless Swimming). Each is a short audio clip of less than ten minutes. (The first truth is that one or two swim workouts a week won’t cut it.)

Now that not just one, but two movies (Breaking The Code and The Imitation Game) have been produced about Alan Turing, it’s time we had a movie about Ada Lovelace. She seems to have possessed an unusual combination of precise reasoning and imagination, strong will, and feminine charm. Plus, she was in the middle of a tug o war between her feuding parents, poet Lord Byron and his wife Anne Isabella.

Why is Ada important? She’s acknowledged to be the first computer programmer (c 1840!). Like Mozart and Turing, her life was tragically cut short at a young age. I propose this biopic today because it’s Ada Lovelace Day!

If you’re using Windows 7 or 8.1, and you’re sick of being nagged by Microsoft’s pop-up to upgrade to Windows 10, go to the Ultimate Outsider website and download and install their GWX Control Panel. It’s received rave reviews. Cost: gratis. Here’s the full description.

New and Improved Method

Update, April 3, 2016: Steve Gibson, founder of GRC (Gibson Research Corp), has written a great little freeware utility that also blocks upgrades to Windows 10. Steve writes most of his code in assembler, so his utilities are tiny. He calls this newest utility Never10. He’s created a page dedicated to Never10, where you may download it for free. It’s only 81 kilobyes in size and doesn’t require installation on your Windows PC. You need just run it once to turn off upgrades to Windows 10, and run it again to allow upgrades to Windows 10. Short and sweet, it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Installing two or more application programs on a PC can chew up your time as you wade through web pages, download prompts that don’t always work, and questions and answers. Now ninite.com (http://ninite.com/) does this tedious work for you. I’ve tried it on a few PCs and it’s worked flawlessly. Install everything in one easy step on your brand-new Windows 7 PC!